Vendor Selection

I spend a lot of time talking to customers and every once in a while I come across a unique one. Today was one of those days.

Now, you have to understand that I spoke to this person after several hours of phone calls. If you have ever done any cold calling you know that most of the time you don't even reach a person, let alone one who will actually talk to you. It was my lucky day. He personally answered his phone. After a bit of prodding, I got this man to open up.

I explained who I was, and what our company did. He politely listened to my speech, then proceeded to tell me that he already had 4 or 5 vendors who were in the same business we were. That was understandable. I know there is a lot of competition out there.

He further explained that when he needs to buy something, he randomly chooses 3 or 4 of the "select" group and asks them for pricing. He then buys from the lowest priced vendor. Pretty normal, so far.

After listening to my diatribe on how we would like to become one his "select" vendors, he explained the rest of the process. This is where it gets weird.

If one of the "select" 4 or 5 happen to annoy him, for some reason or other, they are eliminated from the batch. Then, he goes to a huge file folder on his desk, and sticks his hand in and blindly picks one of the 100 or so brochures (he actually said 200, but I think he exaggerated) and whoever is the lucky winner, gets to be on his "select" list.

Now I had to explain this to my boss. How do you intelligently explain this? The bottom line is that if we want to get in, first, one of the current vendors has to do something to annoy him. Next, we have to be the lucky winner of his random search for a new vendor.

The only other scenario I could think of is that the guy gets fired for his completely unscientific selection of vendors and we can talk to someone else.